On 30 May 2009 at 19:21, Christopher Smith wrote: > Things that are not easy to accomplish in Finale or Sibelius simply > don't appear in notation very often any more. I would include some > specialised jazz notations among those items, though I think most of > Dennis' argument was based around graphic notation. This means that > the next generation might not want to see a hand-formed jazz turn > (gruppetto) and might not even recognise it, for example. Falls used > to be notated in relative length. Now that there is one, maybe two > lengths of falls in the articulation tool, we won't get that level of > detail much any more.
That is actually not a new phenomenon. The old dot vs. stroke controversy c. 1800 has always struck me as an interesting example of engravers having to make decisions on which engraving tool to use when copying from a manuscript in which the staccatto marks could vary from a dot to a hasty dot that almost looks like a stroke, to strokes that are so small they look like dots, to regular strokes, and all the way to hasty strokes that are very large and sometimes lean and look like our modern tenuto marks. I am convinced from looking at Mozart's autographs is some detail that he basically used dot and stroke without any clear distinction, but there's a certain musicality to the way he writes it. That is, it's as if as he writes he's playing the music in his head and as things get more active, dots transition into strokes when, for instance, things are getting more exciting, or louder. I can't make a very good case for this from a scholarly standpoint as I never really kept track of which autographs I saw this in, but it seems to me that much of the modern interpretation of these MSS comes from the forced choice between two engraving tools, when the composers themselves had a whole bunch of gradations, none of which were necessarily notationally distinct, but which actually did go along with the music. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
